Doctors, Fake & Otherwise
by Regency
Summary: AU. It's been three years since the disastrous mission that killed the rest of SG-1 and Sam isn't coping well. PTSD has landed her in Mayfield, where she hopes she can get the help she needs and be close to Cassie while she attends med school. She isn't looking to make allies, but that's exactly what she finds in the genius misanthrope also known as Gregory House. In Progress.
1. Chapter 1

Author: Regency

Title: Doctors, Fake and Otherwise

Crossover: _House, M.D._ & _Stargate SG-1_

Rating: PG for non-graphic violence

Spoilers: AU from the end of season seven of _SG-1_ and the beginning of season six for _House, M.D._

Warnings/Categories: AU, implied character death, angst, friendship, UST, drama, non-graphic violence, mentions of suicidal ideations, deals vaguely with mental disorders

Pairings: implied Sam/Jack UST, Sam/House UST, implied House/Cuddy UST

Word count:

Summary: It's been three years since the disastrous mission that killed the rest of SG-1 and Sam isn't coping well. PTSD has landed her in Mayfield, where she hopes she can get the help she needs and be close to Cassie while she attends med school. She isn't looking to make allies, but that's exactly what she finds in the genius misanthrope also known as Gregory House. What he sees in her, she'll never know, because he'll never tell her. What she sees in him is maybe a second chance.

Disclaimer: I don't own any characters recognizable as being from _Stargate SG-1 & House, M._D. They are the property of their actors, producers, writers, and studios, not me. No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

~!~

"Your file says you're a doctor."

Sam looked up from the _Science_ Journal on her lap to the shadowy figure lurking overhead.

"Does it?" She'd have been more surprised about him knowing that if she hadn't had the pleasure of watching him run roughshod over the staff around here for the last three weeks.

"What's your specialty," he continued without preamble. Sam shrugged and went back to reading in what little light managed to spill around him.

"I'm probably not the kind of doctor you're thinking of." She noticed the way he swayed from his silhouette. _Favors the right leg. Wonder what the story is there._ She turned the page.

"So, you're a fake doctor, then. Brilliant," he quipped with more than a hint of venom. "Just when I thought there was at least one non-idiot around here to save me from the monotony."

"Read a book," she advised and turned the page again. She'd already read this issue twice and gone over it with her nice red pen—she wasn't allowed sharpies, damn it—but it was the only one she had, so once more with contrivance went she.

"All the books here suck. I've already finished the ones I brought with me." Sam raised an eyebrow and resisted the impulse to roll her eyes. For a second there, just for a second, he reminded her so much of Colonel O'Neill that she had to resist to urge to reach for her emergency yoyo. If there was one thing she'd learned in ten years under the colonel's command, it was that he couldn't be trusted to stay out of trouble if he was bored. He needed entertainment and he needed it ASAP.

"You could try asking some of the other patients if they have some books you could borrow." There was a moment of silence so acute that, were it not for the shade he still cast over her, she might have thought he'd wandered away.

"How about you? What kind of books you got?" Sam finally shut the journal and sat back to look at the man so boldly intruding upon her silence.

"None you'd be interested in." Still wavering just so on his feet, he rolled a pair of clear blue eyes towards the heavens.

"Why, thank you, Dr. Feelgood."

Sam loosed an amused smirk. "I told you, I'm not that kind of doctor." Her guest shrugged, eyes flickering toward the floor and taking on an air of uncertainty.

"You read science journals—or _a_ science journal, to be more precise. You've gotta be doing something interesting when you're not playing psych patient."

Sam crossed her arms. She knew it sent all the wrong messages, but she couldn't force herself to care. This wasn't about impressing him, it was about holding herself in tight to keep from bursting apart at the seams. She'd been waiting for the feeling to return for hours, but it'd been gone for days.

"Classified," she grunted through clenched teeth. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to think about it.

She could not smell ozone in the air.

She could _not _smell ozone in the air.

She couldn't feel superheated steel against her skin.

That was not the impression of Daniel's sidearm burning into her side for all time.

Teal'c was not trying to carry what remained of the colonel toward the gate.

There was no gate.

There was no planet.

That was then, before.

_This is now._

_They're dead._

_ I'm alive._

…even if she didn't _feel_ alive.

Sam merely pulled her arms around herself tighter and tighter until the only thing she could feel was her fists against her ribs. _They feel sort of like Daniel's_. She held onto that sense memory as tight as she could. Three years later, she was still expecting him to walk back through the door. _Daniel never dies; he doesn't know how._

He was impervious. They all were—until they weren't.

Now, Sam was all that remained of the once great SG-1. There wasn't a day that went by when she didn't wish she wasn't. That way she wouldn't have to wonder why.

"Hey," said her hovering visitor with a lithe-fingered hand dangling in the air above her shoulder. "You all right? Don't think you can go nuts just because you're in a nuthouse. I need company and you're it, so, snap out of it."

Any other time and place, Sam would have seriously considered decking this guy, but she was grateful enough for his pulling her out of her flashback that she was going to let the opportunity pass her by, just this once. If he touched her any time soon, though, all bets were off.

"What exactly would it take to entertain you," she asked first. "Who are you, anyway? You've seen my file, but I haven't seen yours. That doesn't exactly seem fair." He smirked at her. She considered smacking him in the face. _The last few years have done a number on my social skills._

"Life isn't fair."

Sam rolled her own clear blue eyes this time.

"And you're a pain in the ass. Thank you, Captain Obvious."

He smirked a little and looked highly amused.

"Nice attitude."

Sam raised an eyebrow, Teal'c-style. "Likewise. Think it's contagious."

"Sorry, have to say mine's nurture, not nature. I'd say hereditary, because my dad had it, but since he wasn't really my dad, he was just an asshole. Therefore, I think it's safe to say I got it from the mailman." Sam blinked and leaned back just slightly. _This is a job for MacKenzie if I ever saw one. Okay, maybe not. I wouldn't subject my worst enemy to him._

"You may be the craziest lucid person in the room." At that, the man seemed to preen. _Well, as much as a man who could probably give a damn what others think can preen._

"What can I say? I've been an overachiever all my life." _The line between genius and insanity has been breached. Welcome to Crazytown._

"That's something I know a little about."

"Do tell," he prompted with a curious gleam in his eyes. She shifted uncomfortably in her highly uncomfortable chair.

"Not really in the mood. Besides, I doubt it would interest you."

"And, somehow, I doubt that." He moved his hands as though he was looking for something to lean on, but it wasn't there. He finally settled for his pockets instead. _If he was the colonel, he'd be bouncing on the balls of his feet right about now._ But she didn't want to think about the colonel, he was a trigger, too. Maybe worse than all the rest.

"Then, I admit it'll bore me, then."

"You're the entertainment, you don't get a vote." She thought he looked far too pleased with himself at that. She uncrossed her arms and let them sit on the armrests on either side of her. She wasn't defensive and defending; she was simply watching. She'd learned a thing or two about being the subject of observation over the years.

"Nice to know how you really feel about me."

"Meet me in the janitor's closet after lights out and I'll really show you," he zinged with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows. If Sam thought he was actually serious, she might have been worried. Instead, she chose to be highly amused, as though he was Daniel, wasted, and making an idiot of himself.

"Thanks for the offer, but I have a dinner date with my 9mm around the same time. Maybe next lifetime?" After Daniel had told her about the state the colonel had been in when they met, it was years before Sam felt comfortable joking about suicide. Now that they were both gone, she'd lost any motivation to be tactful. _Guess that's contagious, too._

"A woman with a gun? Getting hotter all the time." Sam had officially run out of facial expressions to answer his inanity. _The colonel would definitely be impressed._

"A woman with a gun, a hunting knife, and level four hand-to-hand combat training? Yeah, I can see how that might get you all fired up." Tall, scruffy, and lame gave her an almost painfully thorough onceover. Every person she'd known who could look through her and at her that way had died years ago. She hadn't expected to ever feel that again—just like she hadn't expected how much she'd miss it.

"Am I imagining you, because it's like you stepped right out my fantasies fully-formed." Sam stifled both of her kneejerk reactions. One was to cry, the other was to smack him in his obviously ailing leg. She settled for allowing their banter to remain a battle of wit and not of brawn. _Teal'c would say that it is dishonorable to strike a physically disabled opponent,_ and she'd always trusted his judgment on those sorts of things.

"Your fantasy world is a scary place."

"Apparently Intake agrees, because they sent me straight up this creek without either paddle or cane to guide me." Sam settled in, because she was actually starting to enjoy him.

"Did they take your meds, too, because that seems like it might have been a premature decision."

He paused, stared balefully at her, and loosed a startling bark of laughter. "Oh, this is the part where I'm supposed to laugh. Sorry, not used to such sophisticated humor."

"I buy that."

"Touché."

"Indeed," she parroted the late and lamented, Teal'c.

"And you say I'm weird," he muttered before turning around and lurching away.

Sam stared after him for a long, confused minute before shaking her head and turning her attention back to her journal. Well, she would have turned her attention back to it, if she could have found it. Apparently, it had walked away during her little tête-à-tête with the limping interloper. She had a feeling she knew where it had gotten to and that she'd be seeing it—and him—again eventually.

For want of anything else to do, Sam stood up and went in search of a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. She hadn't designed anything new in months; now, there were figures and shapes whirling in back of her mind. Maybe it was sudden inspiration, or maybe it was just about time.


	2. Chapter 2

"So, you're a fake."

Sam looked up suddenly to the figure lurking in the open doorway beside her. It was the janitor's closet and Sam just happened to be…er, lurking on by. _I should have expected to see him up this time of night. _

"…Uh. What?" Not her at her most eloquent, but that was about what he should have expected from a patient in a psychiatric institution. Even if she wasn't being medicated—currently.

"What is your _fake_ area of expertise?"

The former Air Force Lt. Colonel stood up straight and looked her interrogator in the eye—as much as she could in the nearly pitch black hallway.

"My very valid specialty is in the field of Theoretical Astrophysics."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said 'valid.' No, I meant 'existent.' Is that even an actual academic field or are you in here because you're a pathological liar?"

Sam inhaled deeply and held it. She decided to humor the cuckoo in the closet. "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." He tipped his head and looked at her askance. "That's why I'm here."

"What happened?"

She decided to give him the clean, unclassified version. "Military training exercise went FUBAR. I lived, my team died. I've been reliving it ever since."

He didn't appear to have anything to say in response.

"Satisfied?"

"Not really. Mostly curious to find out what you're lying about now, because you're definitely still lying."

Sam clasped her hands behind her back, falling instinctively to parade rest. "What gives you that idea?"

"Your eyes dilate in that millisecond between stating a fact and regurgitating a well-practiced fabrication." How he could tell in this dearth of light, Sam didn't know. His wrists twitched and she wondered if he'd be tapping a cane or a crutch right about now. "Turns out you're way more interesting than you seem."

Sam tipped her head to match his posture. "I wish I could say the same about you."

"I would give that a 'Touché,' but why waste a good comeback? I don't have to be interesting, I have charm."

Sam pursed her lips and blinked. "There's nothing I can say to that that won't be construed as offensive."

He narrowed his eyes at her, daring her to say any of what danced on the tip of her tongue. "Do your worst."

"I'll pass." She took a step back to demonstrate.

"Wimp." He staggered out of the gaping janitor's closet until she could see him leaning against the wall in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and loose fitting sleep pants.

"Bully." She could lean against a wall just as well, and banter, too.

"Glorified lab tech." That earned him a glare from her. _Nobody calls me a lab tech._

"Witch doctor." She'd taken a turn at hacking the hospital's patient records herself and found that her newest companion was the slightly eccentric and more than slightly ingenious Doctor Gregory House. Sam wasn't exactly looking to make friends, but it would be nice to talk to someone who understood, well, being the smartest person in the room without trying. It had been years since she'd had that. Daniel and Rodney McKay had been the last people she'd been able to share that with. _Nowadays, I try to share as little with McKay as possible._

"Hey, now, I'm no hypnotherapist. I practice gen-u-wine medicine, real scientific-like and everything," he bantered, a mocking hick accent abounding.

Sam fought the flicker of a smile at her mouth. She really shouldn't encourage him. "Some people would consider your work in diagnostic medicine supernatural."

Now, he seemed intrigued. "Looks like I'm not the only one who's been doing some snooping."

"Never claimed I was above breaking the law to satisfy my own curiosity."

The light from an exit sign made his eyes dance wickedly. "Should I propose now or should I wait until after we have sex?"

"You're assuming there'll be sex. That's highly unlikely."

"You wound me."

"And that's just with words. Imagine what I could do to you with my gun."

"You keep trying to threaten me as if you think that's a turn-off for me. You don't get that I like you because you're interesting, not because you're non-threatening. I _like_ the threatening part," he emphasized with a leer. "And as long as you don't bore me, I'll be right where you don't want me." It was a challenge if Sam had ever heard one, and by God she'd heard a few.

Sam separated herself from the wall and crossed the empty corridor to stand in House's space. Between his knees, she braced herself on the wall behind him, effectively trapping him with more than words. "What if I decide that I do want you…around? Will you get bored, then, and leave?"

He paused a moment, seeming to reason it out in his head. "Probably, but we'll have a hell of a time before I go."

Sam smirked. "Commitment issues are so yesterday. Don't you have any interesting neuroses to share?"

He leaned down till she was faced with the first pair of unique blue eyes she'd seen in years. Nothing like her own, nothing like Daniel's had been. They were aesthetically pleasing, open—far more than he'd probably like, and vulnerable. _This commences the first meeting of the Walking Wounded. First order of business?_

He continued to look into her and Sam was starting to think that the good doctor wasn't just screwing with her. She was starting to think that he just might have been trying to form a connection. _There have to be easier ways to go about this._ Still, she didn't look away. It was least she could do for the first doctor in years to see her as a person and not a lost cause. So, she held his gaze and let him see more than he probably wanted to himself.

"I hallucinate," he confessed after an age, averting his eyes instead of keeping touch with hers. "I pretend I know what's real by responding only intermittently to anyone or anything. Most people just think it's me being _me_, but it's a coping mechanism. I figure if I keep it up, I'll eventually design a full-proof plan for getting through the day."

Sam had to fight the compulsion to rest her forehead against his. There wasn't much of a height difference and it would have been easy. He could have used someone to hold him up just then and she could have used him. But she didn't. She brushed the tips of her fingers against the plastic fastener of his ID bracelet and felt him tense at the touch. He was a taut tripwire, ready to snap and retreat, even if he couldn't get far on his own two feet.

_The colonel used to be this vulnerable. _She didn't like thinking on the fact that even in her head he was never Jack, that she never allowed him to be. _I wish I could have helped him, then._

"I spend my life reliving the past," she responded, finally. "Every other five minutes of my life, I'm back there again. It's a normal day, a normal exercise, the terrain is clear. I'm taking measurements at flank while my CO is covering our six with my other two teammates at point opposing flank, respectively. The colonel, my commanding officer, makes a bad joke. I laugh and there's eye rolling all around. He pretends he doesn't know why."

She didn't know why she was telling this story again, had no idea why she thought he might care, but she needed him to get her. She needed someone to understand that her loss had been real, in the hopes that maybe someone else would remember that these men had existed. It was the only way she could be sure they had.

"His instincts don't even twig when something changes and they've always been good, saved our lives more times…" She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "One minute, nothing has ever been more normal, or perfect, the next minute, we've got fire from the tree line and Daniel's taken a hit to the leg. T—Murray lays down cover fire and I start to all but carry Daniel back to the…rendezvous point. The colonel helps Murray cover us. Just as we're almost safe, a couple of combatants make it past them. Daniel takes out his sidearm even as he's staggering on an almost-useless leg. Colonel takes a hit, a bad one, and Murray throws him over his shoulder. Daniel goes down and takes me down with him. His gun's superheated, burns right through my t-shirt, where it landed. Still have the scar. Just as we hit our extraction point, Murray takes a hit to the back of the neck. Fatal—eventually."

Sam closed her eyes and saw that moment of calm acceptance in Teal'c face as he stumbled under the weight of the colonel's body and sudden paralysis. He wasn't going to live any more than Daniel on the ground beside her, any more than the colonel who'd stopped fighting moments before. He'd known that, then.

In that second, Sam had realized that she was about to be the one left behind.

"Every dream I have is about them. My best friends, my teammates, my family. I see them when they're not there, hear them when they can't speak. I still call their numbers, thinking they'll answer." She sighed, ignoring the phantom echo of the colonel whistling _The Simpsons'_ theme song. She missed the sounds of his distraction: his yoyo spinning as it walked the dog, his fingers and pen tapping on the briefing room table. That and Daniel muttering to himself, coupled with Teal'c's contemplative silence had been the soundtrack to her life for a decade. She wondered if she'd ever be able to accept not hearing it again. She'd still been mourning her father when she'd turned around and lost them.

"So," he began once she thought the silence might crush them, "life sucks, then?"

She cracked a smile in spite of seeing the stillness of their chests tattooed behind her eye lids, maybe for all time. "Yeahsureyabetcha."


End file.
